5 ms·

> An adult working full time on acquiring a language can learn to use a foreign language at an adult level within maybe a year or so. It's just that nobody does

by yorwba 6y ago

> An adult working full time on acquiring a language can learn to use a foreign language at an adult level within maybe a year or so. It's just that nobody does that, because there are other things to do... ... > There is one major disadvantage that adults have though, and that's at acquiring correct pronunciation. I think I've never met a person in my life who didn't learn a language from a very young age and who didn't sound slightly off to a native speaker. I think an adult working full-time on their pronunciation would get within the native range of variation fairly quickly. Even native speakers only adjust their accent very slowly after moving to a new area, but accent coaches can speed up that process a lot. It's just that it involves a lot of tedious practice consciously controlling your tongue when you'd rather just speak freely and have your subconscious take care of tongue movement. So most people who do that are actors or public speakers, for whom pronunciation matters a great deal. The average language learner has better things to do...

svara 6y ago
> I think an adult working full-time on their pronunciation would get within the native range of variation fairly quickly. I'd be interested in learning more about how to do that! I don't think I've ever seen it in real life. Consider for example what it would sound like if you made a wild grammatical mistake in your native language, or completely misused some word. You wouldn't sound like a foreign speaker, but sloppy, tired, or maybe like you were making some sort of joke. I wouldn't even know where to start in order to get to that level in a second language.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  I think the biggest thing is just having someone explain the tongue positions and differences - otherwise, most people do notice that there is something different between how they speak and how natives speak, but can't put their fingers on it. For example, in my native language we don't have the 'th' sounds from English. Most learners approximate the voiceless 'th' with 'f' ('fing', 'frow') and the voiced 'th' with 'z' ('zis fing', 'zat fing'), because they don't even know what to do to pronounce the real sound. Even worse, many consonants and vowels have variations between languages even when they are recognized as the same consonant. R is a famous case, but for example, the Slavic and Latin 't' sound is harder than the English or German 't' - I pronounce my native t with my tongue closer to my teeth than when I'm speaking English. However, one someone points out the specific differences and helps you practice the right tongue movements, it's generally easy to replicate if you're pacient and try for a while. There may be exceptions, like learning to roll your R sounds, to vary pitch or learning click sounds (haven't tried any of these myself, so maybe they're not that hard either).
  - egypturnash 6y ago
    It’s also entirely possible to never figure out the proper tongue positions when you are learning your native language. Instead of an “accent” you then have a “speech impediment”. I grew up with a couple, I had some special instruction in high school to correct the fact that I said my R’s with the same mouth positions used for W’s; I also had a persistent issue with saying “tr” as a mushy kind of “ch” on one side of my mouth that I only finally corrected in, like, my mid-forties. And yeah, once I looked up how to properly pronounce that “tr” it didn’t take too long to fix it.
    - tsimionescu 6y ago
      Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking of when I said that certain sounds are probably harder to get right than others - R and S/TH being the two most common I believe. I'm not sure if this is the same thing as not recognizing how to pronounce a foreign language, or if it is more related to other speech impediments, such as stuttering.
  - gryson 6y ago
    There is extensive research going back many decades that strongly implicates the role of perception in the difficulty that second language learners have with pronunciation. Basically, learners have a tendency to hear the second language through the phonological 'filter' of the first language. They assign incoming speech sounds to categories based on the cues that are used in their first language rather than the second language, so they actually perceive the sounds in a different way from native speakers. This is a concept known as categorical perception. For example, Japanese learners of English tend to perceive English /l/ and /r/ as the same sound and cannot discriminate them reliably in perception experiments. Therefore, we can speculate that they have trouble producing the sounds differentially because they don't actually hear a difference between them. So, the first step in overcoming pronunciation issues is not necessarily to teach tongue positions, but to train perception.
    - Viliam1234 6y ago
      A similar problem is when the other language has a sound that is very similar, but not exactly the same as in your language. For example, if the other language has the same set of wovels, except some of them sound slightly different. As a foreign learner, you are likely to pronounce (and probably also hear) it as exactly the same as in your native language. That is, just like it is difficult to distinguish between "their X" and "their Y", it is also difficult to distinguish between "your X" and "their X". Maybe even more difficult, because no one tells you that the difference exists. > For example, Japanese learners of English tend to perceive English /l/ and /r/ as the same sound and cannot discriminate them reliably in perception experiments. I wonder what would happen if you took a group of Japanese people, taught them how to make the /l/ and /r/ sounds, by telling them how to place the toungue etc., and them told one of them to choose and make one of these sounds, and the other one to guess which one it was. I mean, just like it is easier for one non-native English speaker to understand another non-native English speaker, because they speak more slowly and carefully, maybe it would be easier for one Japanese person to understand another Japanese person's pronounciation of /l/ and /r/, because it would be more exaggerated.

by yorwba 6y ago

svara 6y ago

> I think an adult working full-time on their pronunciation would get within the native range of variation fairly quickly. I'd be interested in learning more about how to do that! I don't think I've ever seen it in real life. Consider for example what it would sound like if you made a wild grammatical mistake in your native language, or completely misused some word. You wouldn't sound like a foreign speaker, but sloppy, tired, or maybe like you were making some sort of joke. I wouldn't even know where to start in order to get to that level in a second language.

tsimionescu 6y ago
I think the biggest thing is just having someone explain the tongue positions and differences - otherwise, most people do notice that there is something different between how they speak and how natives speak, but can't put their fingers on it. For example, in my native language we don't have the 'th' sounds from English. Most learners approximate the voiceless 'th' with 'f' ('fing', 'frow') and the voiced 'th' with 'z' ('zis fing', 'zat fing'), because they don't even know what to do to pronounce the real sound. Even worse, many consonants and vowels have variations between languages even when they are recognized as the same consonant. R is a famous case, but for example, the Slavic and Latin 't' sound is harder than the English or German 't' - I pronounce my native t with my tongue closer to my teeth than when I'm speaking English. However, one someone points out the specific differences and helps you practice the right tongue movements, it's generally easy to replicate if you're pacient and try for a while. There may be exceptions, like learning to roll your R sounds, to vary pitch or learning click sounds (haven't tried any of these myself, so maybe they're not that hard either).
- egypturnash 6y ago
  It’s also entirely possible to never figure out the proper tongue positions when you are learning your native language. Instead of an “accent” you then have a “speech impediment”. I grew up with a couple, I had some special instruction in high school to correct the fact that I said my R’s with the same mouth positions used for W’s; I also had a persistent issue with saying “tr” as a mushy kind of “ch” on one side of my mouth that I only finally corrected in, like, my mid-forties. And yeah, once I looked up how to properly pronounce that “tr” it didn’t take too long to fix it.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking of when I said that certain sounds are probably harder to get right than others - R and S/TH being the two most common I believe. I'm not sure if this is the same thing as not recognizing how to pronounce a foreign language, or if it is more related to other speech impediments, such as stuttering.
- gryson 6y ago
  There is extensive research going back many decades that strongly implicates the role of perception in the difficulty that second language learners have with pronunciation. Basically, learners have a tendency to hear the second language through the phonological 'filter' of the first language. They assign incoming speech sounds to categories based on the cues that are used in their first language rather than the second language, so they actually perceive the sounds in a different way from native speakers. This is a concept known as categorical perception. For example, Japanese learners of English tend to perceive English /l/ and /r/ as the same sound and cannot discriminate them reliably in perception experiments. Therefore, we can speculate that they have trouble producing the sounds differentially because they don't actually hear a difference between them. So, the first step in overcoming pronunciation issues is not necessarily to teach tongue positions, but to train perception.
  - Viliam1234 6y ago
    A similar problem is when the other language has a sound that is very similar, but not exactly the same as in your language. For example, if the other language has the same set of wovels, except some of them sound slightly different. As a foreign learner, you are likely to pronounce (and probably also hear) it as exactly the same as in your native language. That is, just like it is difficult to distinguish between "their X" and "their Y", it is also difficult to distinguish between "your X" and "their X". Maybe even more difficult, because no one tells you that the difference exists. > For example, Japanese learners of English tend to perceive English /l/ and /r/ as the same sound and cannot discriminate them reliably in perception experiments. I wonder what would happen if you took a group of Japanese people, taught them how to make the /l/ and /r/ sounds, by telling them how to place the toungue etc., and them told one of them to choose and make one of these sounds, and the other one to guess which one it was. I mean, just like it is easier for one non-native English speaker to understand another non-native English speaker, because they speak more slowly and carefully, maybe it would be easier for one Japanese person to understand another Japanese person's pronounciation of /l/ and /r/, because it would be more exaggerated.